The TGGF program had brought 24 red roses to place at the gravesites on the opposite side of the Punchbowl.  The program crew actually had one of their men wearing a backpack and earplug walk through – infiltrate – our rose-laying ceremony hushing everyone.

It was a disgrace.

He ruined the somber mood and my blood was now beyond boiling.  Thankfully most of our vets were so focused on placing their roses they didn’t catch what was going on.  This moron laughed as he communicated with some other crewmember on the other side of the cemetery via his cell phone headset.  About this time, a caterer walked over grass and flat headstones, through our vets gathering, with a plate of blackberries and salmon for the actors to snack on.

Remember this the next time you hear some actor or director or other worthless but self-important celebrity whining about how they or their personal cause celebre doesn’t get the respect they think is due.

UPDATE: Tony Katz doesn’t take kindly to a protester trying to interrupt his radio show later in the day:

PPC (myself and Michael Sandoval), Ari Armstrong, Kelly Maher, and Todd Shepherd will be speaking today at 3:15, on building and maintaining state-level blog networks.

UPDATE: taunting OccupyDenver, which is threatening a surprise(!) march on BlogCon 2011 at 5pm tonight…uptwinkles!

UPDATE 2:25: a half-dozen protestors showed up early (surprise!) and tried to break into the conference. They were surrounded by about 40 of us from the conference, who proceeded to taunt and mock them with chants and slogans of our own until they ran away like spanked children (and a few got arrested).

Video and photo later once the other 30 people who captured it have uploaded through the regrettably limited internet.

NOVEMBER 7, 2500:

Seasons formed the rhythm of his work.

The passing seasons themselves formed years, but years were less important in marking the progress he had made. Seasons mattered more to nature, his focus and his purpose, yet sometimes the years intruded into his thoughts. Today, the calendar at the edge of his conscious mind told him it was the five hundredth anniversary of the most significant date in his life. A date more important even than his Uploading, a date which – unappreciated at the time – would change the face of the world itself. The sense memory of a smile colored his electronic thoughts. The seasons can take care of themselves for a few minutes.

Deep under what had once been called Cheyenne Mountain, the disembodied consciousness of Al Gore extended its senses across the world, and saw that it was good.

He had been studying rainforest canopy health in the Amazon basin when the significance of the date penetrated his awareness. The broad-spectrum image from the observation satellite was informative in ways his previous form could never have processed let alone comprehended at a glance, but nostalgia for his flesh-and-blood days moved him to limit his sensors to the human-visible range.  A mottled sea of lush blue-green foliage filled his vision, and a swell of pride surged through his quantum synapses as ancient memories were awakened — had he still possessed lungs, the beauty would have taken his breath away.  Herculean efforts had gone into conserving what little had remained of these rainforests at the midpoint of the 21^st Century and protecting the rainforest’s endangered plants and animals from extinction. Genetic advances in mid-century had allowed the resurrection of many species which had in fact gone extinct in the face of human encroachment and exploitation. High in geosynchronous orbit, his remote eyes zoomed in to a break in the canopy where the Madeira river met the Amazon, and he was rewarded with the sight of Boto dolphins leaping playfully from the swift waters.

Success with the Amazon project had led to further recovery efforts. A polar-orbiting satellite constellation fed him real-time imagery of polar bears frolicking on arctic sea ice – ice which had all but disappeared by the time he was Uploaded to coordinate restoration efforts across the rest of the globe. This view was always his favorite, on those rare occasions when he could take time away from saving the world to actually admire it. Drastic reductions in atmospheric carbon dioxide had been followed by a recovery of annual sea ice, and careful management of the new atmospheric composition kept the icepack within the targeted area and thickness limits.

He cycled his attention across his worldwide network of ground sensors and orbital observatories, taking stock of the fruits of his centuries-long labors. Bold light-blue swirls along the coast of Australia and throughout Micronesia attested to the renewed health of coral reefs, and by extension the oceans around them.  Throughout the western Pacific, the green caps and sandy outlines of low-lying islands poked up from the sapphire-blue sea, no longer threatened by sea-level rise. Looking down at Fiji, he felt a nostalgic longing – how nice it would feel to once again enjoy those broad, sandy beaches, to feel the wind in his hair and the sun on his face and the sand beneath his feet. That was no longer possible, hadn’t been for over four and a half centuries, and never would be again. But it was okay, he thought – some sacrifices had to be made to save the planet, and his physical body was the least of the sacrifices that had been required of him.

His work was by no means done, but he saw no harm in a moment’s pride in what he had so far accomplished. All of this, he mused, was based on the foundation of what had saved the polar bears: nearly 500 years of reductions and strict management of atmospheric CO2 levels. With the eradication of carbon-based industries and the changeover to wind and solar, it was possible to bring the Earth back into balance, and keep it within the limits established so long ago by climatologists’ reconstruction of what the environment was like before human industrialization. Those limits had been enshrined in UN conventions and served as the guideposts for his work to this day. Work which might never have come about but for circumstances which had seemed so unfair and unjust at the time. None of the progress he had made in healing the globe would have been accomplished, but for that strange twist of fate in 2000.

Had I won, he thought, the world would surely have lost.

An indicator interrupted his reverie. His power reserves were running low again, something he was prone to more often this time of year – solar generation was already down because of the shortening days, but it had been especially low for several days due to a cloud system parked stubbornly over the region. Once again, he wondered if it had been such a smart idea to dismantle the last of the wind turbines on the nearby plains, but he only had to remind himself of the millions of birds whose lives that action had spared over the past seven decades to confirm the greater wisdom of that decision. He sighed and prepared his systems to hibernate for the evening, so as to conserve what energy remained in his battery networks and flywheel clusters.

His higher cognitive functions began their scheduled shutdown, a strange simulation of drifting off to sleep. As he reflected a few more milliseconds on the triumphs of the past millennium, a profound loneliness crept into his fading awareness, one that always came at those moments when he wished he had someone with whom he could celebrate. He was always certain of the greater wisdom of this decision, too, but it was a loneliness he never anticipated when he concluded saving the world meant exterminating all of humanity.

This got me to thinking this morning about the visuals of the event, and it dawned on me that really, back then, we had nowhere near the ubiquitous video and personal communications technologies that we take for granted now. What would our memories of 9/11 look and feel like had there been ten thousand people in and around lower Manhattan and the Pentagon that morning with 10+MP DSLRs or HD video cameras?

A far, far more interesting question in that vein: how might the day have been different had there been a dozen or more cameraphones on each of the hijacked planes, recording (and perhaps live webcasting) the actions of the hijackers as events unfolded? Given some of the weird things recovered from the four planes afterward, some of these cameras would have undoubtedly survived intact, at least intact enough for the data to have been retrieved later. (Never mind that today’s better phones would have given the passengers a more immediate awareness of what was going on and some ability to coordinate with each other and the ground - which means we might have had two more Flight 93s, given that that flight’s passengers were motivated to act by the knowledge of what had already happened to the other three planes.)

This in turn led to a few other thoughts of what is different now and what has happened since then:

• Social media, video/photo sharing sites: Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Ustream, etc. have all come into being since 2001. Imagine too how different 9/11 would have been had people in the towers been tweeting or Facebooking what was going on inside, or sending pictures and video to the web. Or how many more people might have escaped from the upper floors had there been some way to learn from survivors and communicate to those still trapped the fact that there was still one stairwell intact through the impact zone. And how much less “Truther” bullshit there would be with near-holographic imagery and narrative of the entire sequence of events.
• “Trutherism” and the mainstreaming of conspiracy theorizing: I used to be interested in conspiracy theory stuff (it was fascinating as aberrant psychology), but before 2001 I had never seen it as widespread and accepted as a tool for looking at the world. And I don’t mean merely the ‘Loose Change’ variety concerned with 9/11 itself — look at how the American left has embraced the notion that behind every event (and especially every action of the Bush Administration) there is at work a sinister conspiracy involving their ideological enemies. It’s not simply mainstream, it has become the very water in which most leftists seem to swim. And yes, this kind of paranoia has afflicted the American right to some degree (witness “Birtherism” and some of the wilder ”seekrit Obama” notions), but nowhere near the degree it has with the left, to whom every GOP policy proposal is a dastardly plan to enslave America to corporations and the super-rich, every gathering of three or more liberty-minded citizens is a Koch-funded astroturfed racist/fascist Tea-Klanner lynchmob, every mention of faith by a conservative is proof they are Taliban-like theocrats who want to oppress women and turn America into a continent-spanning evangelical megachurch, every natural disaster is instigated and deliberately exacerbated by cruel and sadistic Republicans (especially George Bush), and every Republican caught with his pants down (figuratively or literally) is part of a baroque and sinister “culture of corruption” involving Opus Dei, “The Family”, secret gay associations and S&M clubs, child sex rings, Dick Cheney, the John Birch Society, or (somehow) all of the above. 
• Getting news from the internet rather than traditional outlets: I don’t think I’d ever heard of a blog until 9/11, when I came across a link to Instapundit that day on some discussion forum or other – probably Free Republic (which hadn’t yet become unreadable). Indeed, it’s hard to remember just what I read on the internet before blogs came along. Sure, there was Drudge, and there were sites for the mainstream news outlets (CNN, Fox, the networks, major papers), but 9/11  was unquestionably the catalyst for blogs specifically and for what has come to be known nowadays as citizen journalism.
  Of course, the explosion of alternative news sites might have been less…um…explosive, had Old Media done a better job of reporting on the events the 9/11 set in motion over the following years. It wasn’t merely that new sources of information suddenly became available, it was that the information they provided (especially in the form of fact-checking and alternative analyses/opinions) shone a megawatt-class spotlight on the failings previously illuminated by the Lewinsky affair and other Clinton-era scandals and the 2000 election fiasco: the Old Media could no longer be trusted to tell the truth about anything, or to present a sober, reasonable interpretation or analysis of the facts. And the longer and more vigorously Old Media pretended that this was not the case (ignoring bloggers, deriding them as ‘writing in their pajamas’, etc.), the more their attempts to continue steering narratives and selectively reporting facts undermined their influence and public trust.
• Security theater: do I really need to rant about TSA, which wouldn’t exist and whose moronic and ineffectual antics we wouldn’t have to endure were it not for 9/11?
• Islam in public awareness: before 9/11, I doubt one American in a thousand gave Islam or the cultures under its domination any thought beyond the violent and incomprehensible goings-on in the Middle East as shown on the nightly news. Now we have in our shared vocabulary terms like jihad, jizya, taqqiya, burqa, hijab,  halal, haram, imam, fatwa, Shia, Sunni, wahhabism, and kuffar, and in our common awareness concepts such as honor killings, female genital mutilation, suicide martyrdom, dhimmitude, 72 virgins, “islamophobia”, and worldwide caliphate. Ordinary Americans know a lot more about Islam today than they ever have…but what they have learned is unflattering, to say the least.
  There is also a greater attention paid and credibility given to the claims and goals of radical Islamists and Islamic terror organizations. When these people claim they want to kill non-Muslims around the world, take down the Great Satan, establish a global caliphate, or sing the other perennial favorites from the jihadist hit parade, people take them seriously. If such are really the goals of Islamic radicals, they really screwed the pooch by tipping their hand with 9/11 — now everyone (except elected officials, the media, and the left) is on to them.
• Israel in public awareness: I’ve always been positively disposed towards Israel in some degree, even before I was politically aware. Since 9/11, though, it seems we have been discussing Israel a lot more, and Israel itself has been under a rapidly growing threat despite the concessions it has made in pursuit of a peace agreement, all while more Americans more vocally and more deeply express their support for the country. (On the flip side, a vocal minority in academia and the activist left seems increasingly willing to unfairly criticize or demonize Israel for its every action, and more generally to revive both the ’genteel’ and crude forms of antisemitism which had been consigned to the historical garbage pile following WWII — something I never thought I’d see.) While some denominations of evangelical Christians (for example) have long supported Israel for reasons rooted in their faith, after 9/11 there seems to have emerged a more general sense of Israel as a front-line ally in the same fight that was suddenly brought to our own shores.
• The corrosion of the multicultural left: I started seeing this with that ugly rant a few days after by Sunera Thobani — I knew something like that was coming, it was utterly predictable that we would be made the villains and the perpetrators would be turned into the victims or even heroes. I was merely surprised that it took 3-4 days.
  Whether they would admit it or not, those pushing bogus ”multiculturalism” and its parallel concepts are in retreat. The new awareness of other cultures brought on by 9/11, and the access to more and less-filtered information on other cultures, has undermined the “noble savage” foundations on which these philosophies are based — no, America is not an irremediably evil entity deserving of all this and more, and no, all other non-Western cultures are not uniformly peaceful and enlightened and therefore superior precisely because they are non-Western, non-capitalist, non-technological, non-industrial, or non-[fill in the boogeyman].
  The more shrill and offensive people like Thobani and Churchill became, the less credibility they had beyond their hard-core devotees, the more they turned people off to the ideas they were trying to peddle, and the more apparent it became that their gratuitously offensive ”critiques” had probably amounted all along to little more than juvenile “shock the bourgeois” gimmickry aimed at generating followers, funds, and fame. And as the left continued to criticize America and the West for its treatment of minorities and women and such while blatantly ignoring the atrocities committed routinely in and by the nations and cultures and worldview we have been fighting the past ten years, it became clear that for all their impressively incomprehensible academic language and posturing, they’re merely self-loathing hypocrites with serious envy issues towards that which they claim to most abhor.

There’s a lot more in that vein, and I may add more later, but other responsibilities are calling. Suffice to say, the past ten years would have been vastly different without 9/11, and an attack like that would have turned out very differently had it happened today rather than in 2001.

I did, however, catch a bit of commentary on the radio while running errands Friday afternoon. Not sure what show it was (didn’t recognize the host — name was something like “Joe Pax”), but I tuned in just in time to hear a rant about how the end of the Shuttle program without a replacement on hand was a national tragedy, and that it came about because Obama cancelled Bush’s space policy only because it was Bush’s space policy.

Let’s unpack that, shall we?

The “national tragedy” bit simply repeated the received (un)wisdom that the end of Shuttle = end of US manned space exploration. Not so — NASA civil servant astronauts will still be flying to the predominantly-US International Space Station for the foreseeable future, albeit via the Russian Soyuz. New domestically-built and -launched spacecraft are a couple years out, so yes, we won’t be able to send NASA astronauts up on American-made vehicles for a while, but that does not equate to the end of an American presence in space. This part, though, I can understand — if someone hasn’t been following post-Columbia space policy, it may seem as though we are simply shutting down the manned side of NASA and giving up on space.

The worse flaw in his argument is the assertion (very strongly and unambiguously made by the host) that Obama cancelled the policy because it was Bush’s. This is utter bullshit, which a few minutes of research would have revealed as such. The policy that Obama cancelled (in part) was Mike Griffin’s, not George W. Bush’s. (While it’s true that Griffin reported to Bush who was in turn ultimately responsible, Constellation was unquestionably Griffin’s ill-begotten baby.) Bush gave us the broad policy of the VSE, which was later hijacked at the implementation level by Mike Griffin for his own vanity projects — the crowning glory of which was his Ares I launcher.

Griffin’s Constellation architecture is what was largely cancelled in February 2010, and with good reason — it was ill-conceived, over-sold, over-budget, under-performing, and behind schedule (more on that last in a moment). Obama’s cancellation of Griffin’s program was arguably the only good thing the man has accomplished as President, and it was done not out of spite for his predecessor (which I admittedly wouldn’t put beyond him), but because of the aforementioned problems.

And this brings us to the “gap” in American manned access to space, which was the inspiration for the rant. Had it not been for Griffin’s Ares-based Constellation architecture and its follow-on effects on the design of Orion, Orion might well have been ready to fly by now, or at the least with a minimal “gap” between Shuttle flyout and Orion IOC. Constant redesigns of Ares I and trouble meeting its performance goals meant redesigns and ultimately the stripping down of Orion, which in turn led to schedule slips with the latter. Had Orion (whether in in the original lifting-body form or the Griffin-mandated capsule form) been directed to fly on an EELV — in-production rockets with known performance characteristics and much more benign flight environments — a good portion of its development schedule slip could have been avoided. Which means we would have had little if any “gap” to cause radio talk show hosts consternation, nor reason for said hosts to suspect partisan motivations behind a necessary shift in space policy.

To be fair, when I came back to the program about fifteen minutes later, the host was admitting (apparently at the prompting of a caller I had missed in the meantime) that the shift to a more commercial orientation for manned access to space was a welcome development. But rather than rethink his earlier foolishness, he stuck to his guns and (incredibly, for a supposedly right-wing, pro-business, free-markets type of host) expressed doubt that commercial providers could ever fill that role. Which is disappointing — if people who are supposed to favor private enterprise allow their “national greatness” emotional priorities take precedence over letting a new industry take root, who will defend the new industry against those who don’t favor private enterprise?

A really interesting collection of bloggers, including the director of the only free-market think-tank in Central Asia.

I guess one has to expect many differences from the source material, given that the producers don’t have a Lord of the Rings-scale budget with which to depict the “period” setting of the book — regrettably, since the “yesterday’s world of tomorrow” flavor of the book would have made for some noir/Deco/raygun gothic eye candy. The question is how well they’ve handled these differences and how consistent the differences are with the overall themes of the book — do the movies still tell the same fundamental story?

I am concerned a bit with the acting, though. It could be that the scenes shown just don’t match the urgent mood of the music used in the trailer, but the actors (particularly the one playing Dagny Taggart) seem a little too subdued for the lines they are speaking given the scenes in the book from which those lines are taken.

As for props, the one glimpse of the Rearden Metal bridge is intriguing (that has to be the single hardest object from the book to visualize, based on Rand’s description). On the other hand, the “device” from Starnesville looked pretty close to what I expected except for size — in the book, Dagny and Hank have to struggle to free it from the junk pile, and it is later shown wrapped in a tarp in Hank’s trunk. I guess I was expecting something about the size of a car’s engine block, but perhaps something the size of a coffee pot is actually more reasonable given that the device is an early engineering prototype.

If the NASA Space Shuttle is able to reenter from the orbit of the Earth then the NASA Space Shuttle is able to reenter because of the heat of 1,500 °C.
The NASA Space Shuttle isn’t able to reenter because of the heat of 1,500 °C.
Hence, the NASA Space Shuttle isn’t able to reenter the orbit of the Earth.

If the NASA Space Shuttle is able to reenter from the orbit of Earth then the NASA Space Shuttle is in orbit.
The NASA Space Shuttle isn’t in orbit.
Therefore, the NASA Space Shuttle isn’t able to reenter from the orbit of Earth.

They “syllogism” format sure looks familiar from Loughner’s known rantings.

It also reminded me of the old Robert Lavelle “Space Ends and Moves” spam emails from several years ago, which those who worked in the aerospace industry or at NASA at the time may recall.

Not sure if this means anything, but given Loughner’s apparent personal obsession with Giffords and the fact that her husband is a Shuttle commander, there could be something there motivating his ranting about NASA.

[hat tip: el Presidente]